Liberalism: a joke, literally

It's a bit rich to pile on a "free-thinker" like Kanye West, who implores us to "lead with love," when the best critics and pundits are themselves bankrupt of compelling ideas.

Take Andrew Sullivan, for example, a shrewd and reasonable thinker. In a recent offering, he expertly deconstructs how Viktor Orbán has transformed Hungary from a "prosperous 21st-century liberal democracy into an illiberal one, and then into a de facto dictatorship," before touching on the Apu controversy and celebrating the fact Lisa Simpson has not "morphed into a permanently aggrieved racial activist, intent on removing every lamentable obstacle on the march toward boundless diversity." Comedy is sacrosanct.

It's true: the backsliding in Eastern Europe is a wake-up call for "the complacency so many have lapsed into." Democratic collapse is no longer mere theory. Like other Western nations, America is being pressed now, from both the left and right, to choose between genuine liberty and illiberalism. And the temperature will go on rising until it's sorted, one way or the other.

Let's go one better, as the panel did on Bill Maher's Real Time, and assume the president is impeached and convicted. "What do you do with the disaffected 40 per cent who are going to be unhappy about it?" asks Jordan Peterson. No response from fellow commentators. Yet it's OK to go on using the same divisive, politicized mindset. Is the assault on democratic norms populist idiocy, or are dreary elites missing something of note? What is it we must wake up to?

In addition to Kanye hitting Twitter, the Facebook data-mining scandal provides some clues.

"It's no good fighting an election campaign on the facts because actually, it's all about emotion," ventures a Cambridge Analytica executive during a secretly recorded interview. "The big mistake political parties make is that they attempt to win the argument rather than locating the emotional center of the issue, the concern, and speaking directly to that."

While it's generally agreed politics involves hearts and minds, we rarely reflect on their interaction and respective role in assigning value.

The mind is all about Science, the material and rational. What goes on in the human realm of things, data, ideology, rules, debates over the function of government and justified use of power. Trade-offs are considered, compromises made.

Advertisement

Our spiritual needs, on the other hand, are absolute and indivisible, knowable only in a heart-felt or emotional manner. Art is instinctive, its visceral understandings of what truly matters too immediate to be explained or validated, in a fully rational sense. As Peterson has said elsewhere, meaning and purpose "shine forth" through everyday reality, rendering life an unfolding, holistic experience that defies definition. Myth and narrative, poetry and music, are our best approximations of an answer.

Reconciling heart and mind, in both public and private life, is a challenge. Science is utterly necessary. Abandon empirical or rational reality, and things fall apart. Yet it's also deficient. We can't argue, buy, or innovate our way into the moral realm, or mechanize its Artistic truthsfor convenience. Regardless of how powerful or democratic the organization, how sophisticated Facebook's algorithm, or commendable your religious or secular orthodoxy, the sociological structure these measures provide can't be relied upon to take us All The Way. As Patrick Deneen commented when promoting Why Liberalism Failed, "we are deeply within the liberal mindset if we believe we can just come up with a new theory and, presto, we will have a new politics and a new way of life."

If things aren't to fall apart in a different way, the Science has to, at some point, yield to what is sufficient, what is universal and more rewarding than materialism.

About the Author

Mark is a social and political commentator, with a background in economics. He
also has an abiding interest in philosophy and theology, and is trying to write
a book on the nature of reality. He blogs here.